Hell Runs on Gasoline!
2015 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Martin Bureau
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, dark, surreal
At the Saint-Félicien racetrack, stock cars crash, engines burn and smoke fills the air before the wreckage is left in a quiet scrapyard.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Most people watch stock car racing for the speed; Bureau watches it die—and somehow makes destruction feel like the real spectacle, which is exactly the kind of perverse inversion everyone else missed.
The film's architecture is impeccable: it mirrors the classical documentary arc (action, entropy, stillness) while embedding itself in the lineage of structural cinema that finds metaphysics in industrial decline—a controlled, meditative piece that knows precisely what it owes to its forebears.
The decision to let the scrapyard sequence breathe in near-silence after all that roaring engine noise is what transforms this from competent observation into something haunting—one sonic choice that reframes the entire moral weight of what we've just watched.